Blacklight: Tango Down

I'd like to start this review by saying that I am magnetically attracted to Steam sales. Steam has some of the absolute fucking best sales for video games I've ever seen. Just wait till the holiday shopping season and bam, there you go, a whole shit-ton of forty dollar games priced often at less than ten dollars, and sometimes even less than five. I've bought at least three quarters of my entire Steam library from these sales. I'd also be very willing to guesstimate that I haven't even played half of it. Considering my gullibility, thinking that I'll buy all of these games and then actually get around to playing them all, you could call me a victim rather than a customer. I'd be fine with that, and even I, in some cases, call myself the victim. One of these cases is when I'm playing Blacklight: Tango Down.

Blacklight was released in July of last year in the wake of the extreme popularity of Call of Duty 6. With the latter still priced at a mind numbing sixty dollars and my experiences of it being limited to free weekends and playing the singleplayer campaign on a friend's computer, I wasn't willing to pay one cent for that. However, when I saw Blacklight for the first time, I noticed its striking similarity to what the most recent Call of Duty games had been doing, but I also noticed the juicy, low, marked down sale price of seven and a half dollars. "That's just about what this kind of game is worth!" I thought, and so a friend and I quickly bought it and decided to play. After all, what could go wrong with what was essentially a much cheaper, slightly smaller version of a blockbuster hit? It touted co-op play, a leveling system with an amazing number of unlocks, and multiplayer that contained all the staple gamemodes of all the popular multiplayer shooters of late.

The answer to that question of course was a resounding "everything." Because this game was much more geared toward console gamers, the number of players was low, often dwindling on none at all. The only multiplayer gamemode I found with people actually playing was Team Deathmatch, which the game was so kind as to select for me by default. What I did get to play was pretty standard modern shooter fare. You get to make your own class, each with a primary and a secondary weapon, two types of grenades, a one-hit-kill melee attack, and a few customizable extras, such as armor design and weapon camouflage coloring. You're put on one of two teams and you run around shooting at bad guys until one team gets enough points to win or until time runs out.

There is one feature that makes this game a bit unique, though, and that would be the HRV, or hyper-reality visor. The HRV is essentially a limited wallhack. You can activate it for a short period of time and it screws up your sight and takes away your ability to use weapons, but it also allows you to spot enemies and health and ammo caches behind walls. It's an incredibly effective deterrent to camping while still being a very powerful tool for snipers, and despite how volatile a concept such as this could be, it's not overpowered at all.

The rest of the game, of course, is nowhere near as good. Blacklight suffers from Games For Windows Live (or GFWL) syndrome, our first symptom being very noticeable here. Lag. Lag, lag, and more lag... Since the playerbase is incredibly thin and there are no dedicated servers, everything being hosted locally on a person's PC, many people are victims of massive lag. Now, I'm not a pro at fast-paced twitch-centric shooters like this, but I'm not terrible. There were many occasions when I simply was unable to kill the opponents because my connection to the game host was too poor. The melee attack is a very good example of how noticeable the lag can be at times. It's fully animated, always kills someone in one hit, and automatically locks onto a target before bringing him down. There were many occasions when I shoved the butt of my gun right up someone's ass only to have him fall over as much as a whole second later. Other times, I smacked the bitch right in his stupid face, only to have him kill me in the same way I had attempted to kill him.

To make matters worse, everyone has dangerously low health. Now, don't get me wrong, I enjoy games that do this, so long as they do this right. Hell, I even got near the end of the third level of Far Cry on realistic difficulty. Too bad that half the time people dying in Blacklight is probably caused by their ping being a little too high for them to readily respond to incoming fire. Low health is also not very good considering how you spawn. When playing Call of Duty, one of the things I actually like is the dynamic spawn system. You know, how if your team gets overrun in one location, it doesn't keep spawning and subsequently dying there. Blacklight has fixed spawns in bases on either side of the map, and there are limited entrances as well as turrets set up for defending these entrances, but one step outside of the base can mean certain death almost instantly. This isn't common because there are rarely organized teams that can actually plan this, but when it happens, it really, really happens. There is also no invulnerability when you spawn, which could have easily balanced this problem out.

I'd also like to take some of your time to pick at the leveling and unlocking system, which is flat-out broken. You have to work far too much for your rewards. I've played about eleven hours of CoD7 so far and have amassed about half of the arsenal it has to offer: submachine guns, shotguns, sniper rifles, et cetera, along with plenty of fancy widgets for each kind like flamethrowers and different kinds of sights. In Blacklight, you start out with the five standard primary weapons that you'll be using the entire time you play. I've played about eleven hours of it and am much less satisfied by my rewards for my hard work. I've unlocked all four models of pistols and a few different stocks, barrels, and scopes! Phew, does this game scream color and excitement or what!

Because of GFWL Syndrome, there is also a 360-like matchmaking system that doesn't work very well. Instead of doing the logical thing for a multiplayer shooter on the PC, namely supporting dedicated servers and listing them in a comprehensive server roster, you choose your gametype (in every case, team deathmatch) and hope it picks the least laggy match for you, if there is one at all. It loves to make you wait while it twiddles its thumbs looking at two or three games that you could simply join by yourself if the developers just gave you a list with each server's latency and player count.

All that said, very few of these criticisms actually have to do with the actual quality of the gameplay, just the rottenness of its shell. Its multiplayer is absolutely terribly presented for a PC market and sure, getting a big check from Microsoft for giving it GFWL syndrome is tempting, but sales could probably be a lot better if, you know, they put in something actually meant for PC games. Here's an idea! Since it's only available through digital distribution, why not make the PC version a Steam exclusive and change some of the netcode and get money from Valve? Though I'm no coder, I assume some of that's possible.

Anyway, don't forget that no blockbuster multiplayer shooter would be a blockbuster multiplayer shooter if it didn't have tacked-on singleplayer and co-op campaigns! Oh, no! What the singleplayer amounts to is four missions that take place in a desolate city somewhere in Eastern Europe. Your main job as part of the Blacklight squad is to go places and kill people, these people being either soldiers in a force called "the Order" or hoodlums that jump around like monkeys known as "the Infected." There's apparently a backstory somewhere in the help menus, but I've never read it and I certainly don't need to. "Here are some bad guys," the woman with the indecipherable accent announces to you, and then you shoot them.

It's too bad that these bad guys aren't really good at shooting you. Mostly, the Order strafe and take cover, not really using any tactics other than getting gradually closer to you. They spray their bullets in your general direction and hope that you die. That's about all there is to it. The Infected run toward you and hit you, and some have enough brain power to hold a gun and shoot at you just like the big kids. I think I also met one or two who flung rocks at me. I shot them in their stupid faces. You have the HRV thing that I mentioned earlier, but there's absolutely no incentive to use it because the enemies don't use any tactics to hide and flank you. It's a pretty damn mundane experience, but I guess if you're into, and I mean really fucking into guns that are fun to shoot, it might be fun. After all, the guns are pretty nice-feeling, especially the default pistol. I'll give Blacklight a little credit for that.

And now despite that little light note let's go back down into the abyss of merciless criticism. Okay, so there's co-op, of course. This basically manifests itself as two to four players doing the job of one, but you have to admit that every game is more fun with co-op. After all, if it's a bad game, you have someone to make fun of it with, and if it's a good game, you have someone to build a team and friendship with. They're both positive experiences in my opinion, but I'd pick the latter any day, so if you're looking for co-op you can save yourself the pain of playing this and get a better, more reputable game like Left 4 Dead or Borderlands.

For a game whose price since release has been an astonishingly low fifteen dollars, it does deserve some recognition for its aesthetics. Plenty of the special effects are very pretty and unique, especially grenade effects, like the smokescreen that looks like static, or the flashbang that gives you a blue screen of death. There are plenty of little details that make Blacklight look pretty different. The menus are also very nice, looking cluttered with random numbers and letters and lines everywhere yet still being easily navigable. Sound is also nice overall, especially the kick of the guns and the little ambient sounds given off by the environments. There's no music other than the main menu theme that I can remember, but it's pretty good too.

Of course, being a shit game one of whose major selling points is that it's cheap, the graphics are pretty good but the actual environments are bland. You want to know how I know the game is set in Eastern Europe? The developers say so. Some streets are paved with stone and the signs on buildings use the Cyrillic alphabet, but apart from those two slightly noticeable instances, the setting is any old boring grey city you can think of. There are also the standard ugly effects that scream "Unreal Engine 3!" at the top of their lungs such as its ugly bloom and motion blur.

I decided to try Blacklight: Tango Down because it seemed like a cheap alternative to blowing away sixty dollars on a weak, simple shooter. What I ended up with was an even weaker shooter, a checklist of all the features that the most popular shooter at the time contained. Add to that the lag coughs and sneezes along with the general inconvenience caused by GFWL Syndrome and you have one of my candidates for flat-out worst game of all time. It's affordable with above average graphics and sound design, and a few hours of play, but it gets stale easily and the lag, tiny playerbase, and shitty co-op make it completely not worth your time. In conclusion, the end.